24th
COM 317—Ian Bogost—Airport Security
Ian Bogost is a professor at Georgia Tech University and a founding partner at Persuasive Games. Unlike most video games, he centers them around several issues like airport security or corruption in businesses. There is even a first date simulator where your quickness and what you say is tested. All of his works deal with issues as there is a much larger picture that needs to be addressed as opposed to games with an objective of killing someone/something or completing other tasks. While they deal with these issues, the games are very addicting as they are quick to pick up and play. The instructions are also very simple as the majority only involve point and click buttons. This is key in that anyone can go onto the website and play these games.
The piece to be looked at is one of the games from the Persuasive Games Company. The game, “Airport Security” is a very interesting game as you actually control airport security. The art itself is simple for today, it is not the state-of-the-art engine that you see in today’s console games. However this is expected of games that can be played for free. The passenger characters scroll through and have the features of a less-quality “Mii” character from the Nintendo Wii. Mii’s generally looked like Lego people as these passengers have mild happy or sad expressions while their clothing is normally of one shade of color.
As passengers pass through the detector there is a message of what the airport deems as a “security alert.” In the example above the security has deemed hats to be a “threat.” In that case, the player must click on the hat to get rid of it and if there is a hat in their suitcase. However time is important, as the game progresses more items become illegal. For example that toothpaste in the above picture could suddenly become illegal. Players must pay close attention to the upper-right as the hat could remain. There are even alerts where items could be cleared and passengers may continue with them. With the example before, an alert could appear where the toothpaste is no longer a security threat. This is important because the player cannot simply strip the passenger of everything. Passengers in line will begin to grow impatient and the current passenger will feel threatened in the case of where a player will lose points or even get a game over where they will have to start the process all over again. Despite having this power over the passengers it’s important to note that these CPU passengers have rights. Should these rights be violated by the player then they will fail at the task.
The items are also very clear so it is easy for the player to distinguish what items are which. The game constantly tests your quickness as time is your biggest enemy in this game. In a rather comedy way of scoring points, the player can receive bonus points for getting people safely through the security gate while also ridding them of the illegal items. It seems very odd but also humorous that the player can be rewarded for being exceptionally good at airport security where in the real world this may go un-noticed.
